(Suggestion for Expansion) Dungeon Delve Mode

[Alweth]

It would be great if you could have a Dungeon Delve Mode. It would work one of these ways, either:
 

- You can't leave the dungeon until you've beaten the core quest/boss at the bottom of the dungeon. (Special auto-save before you enter.)

OR

- Leaving the dungeon resets the dungeon, but you still get to keep any experience/loot you got. Respawned mobs don't drop loot a second time.

[Alweth]

So, having thought about this a little more, this is what I think the expansion or sequel should do: Divide all areas of the game into different categories that determine the resting rules:

1. Town: Full rest after every fight.
    
2. Wilderness/Monster Den: Full rest after every fight. Here the goal would be to make every encounter require all your resources.
    
3. Dungeon: Limited rests, but you can leave at any point, with all the experience and loot you've acquired. However, leaving respawns the dungeon. The goal would be to make a "how low can you go?" experience where going deeper gets you better rewards each time, or a "this time I want to explore the left branch" experience. Scripted rests could be of the form, "The floor breaks beneath you, leaving you trapped in an abandoned cellar. The party rests as you go about determining how to get out," or "This spot seems sufficiently out-of-the-way for you to rest for a while. <hours later> Uh oh, Xaurips have spotted you. Looks like you're not going to be able to use this spot any longer." In both cases the location is compromised for resting after you've used it. You wouldn't want to make these areas so big that the player becomes bored of playing through the same encounters over and over again, although it could become a chance for sneaking and other ways of avoiding encounters to shine.
    
4. Assault: No resting or leaving until you've defeated the main boss/accomplished the objective or lost. Losing would load to before the assault, but maybe provide you with a consolation prize of a little money and/or experience (not to mention spoiler knowledge). On some assaults, a loss will give the player the option to give up. Giving up would alter the plot (like a quest decision). I think letting you switch out wounded characters for fresh ones could be fine, as long as there was some way to prevent the player from just using endless Adventurer's Hall characters. Beating an assault area would turn it into a Monster's Den/Town-like area depending on what made sense. Like with Dungeon areas, you wouldn't want these to be too large or the player could become frustrated by effectively losing hours of play.
    
5. Journey: A variation of Assault where you set off for a new location for the first time. (For example, travel between Defiance Bay and Dyrford.) It would just be a series of pre-determined encounters: bandits, roadblocks, meetings with mysterious strangers, and PoE-style choose-your-own-adventure vignettes. Afterwards the areas you traveled through would become Wilderness areas that you could return to and explore more thoroughly.
    
6. Combination: Not really an area type, but you could place an Assault area within a Dungeon area.

The idea would be to allow the player to experience the tension of resource management and the urgency of assault where appropriate without forcing those mechanics on the whole game.

Edited April 17, 2015 by Alweth

[Daemonjax]

Yeah, good ideas.

 

Basically, the game shouldn't let you do things that a DM in a pen-and-paper game wouldn't let you do without consequences -- like leave a dungeon and come back later fully healed... again, without consequences.

Edited April 18, 2015 by Daemonjax